Chapter 13

Richard texted me on the way home from the press conference, three words that closed a door I’d been holding open in the back of my mind for two days.

Richard: Patent deal signed. Yours.

I read it twice in the back of the town car, watching Manhattan slide past the window, and felt something settle that I hadn’t realized was still unsettled. Whatever else happened with Van Corporation, whatever the board decided, whatever fraud review followed — the work itself, finally, legally, completely, belonged to me. Nothing about today’s ballroom performance could touch that.

I put my phone away and let myself actually feel what had happened in that room.

Dana was waiting at my apartment when I got home, sitting on my front steps in the cold with two coffees, because apparently Marcus had already texted her a play-by-play before I’d even left the building.

“You’re a meme,” she said, handing me a cup as I climbed the stairs toward her. “Already. Forty minutes after it happened.”

“Wonderful.”

“No, genuinely, it’s good,” she said, following me inside. “Footage of him saying that to you, your face — Evelyn, people are calling it the most devastating non-reaction in finance media history. Someone made a slow-motion edit.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “I just want to know what actually happened in your head when he said it.”

I sat down on the edge of my bed, still in my coat, and tried to find the honest answer instead of the composed one.

“I think some small, stupid part of me has been waiting five years to hear him say something like that,” I said slowly. “And now that he’s finally said it, in front of cameras, to repair his own reputation as much as mine — I don’t actually feel anything close to satisfied.”

“What do you feel?”

“Tired,” I said. “And angry that I still recognized the exact tone he used to use with me, late at night, when he actually meant something. He used that same voice today. In a press conference. For an audience.”

Dana was quiet for a moment, turning her coffee cup the way Vivian had turned hers in that overpriced shop two days ago — an unconscious tell, apparently universal among women trying to choose their next words carefully.

“Do you think he meant it?” she asked. “Underneath the performance. Do you think any of it was real?”

I thought about his eyes finding mine across that ballroom before he’d even answered the question. The way he hadn’t looked away once cameras turned toward him.

“I think he meant it,” I said. “That’s almost the worst part. I spent five years wanting exactly that kind of honesty from him in private, and the first time I actually get it, it happens in a room full of strangers, as part of his damage control.”

“That’s not fair to you.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

My phone buzzed around nine that evening, after Dana had gone home, after I’d eaten dinner alone and tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on anything other than the loop of his voice saying thank you across thirty feet of ballroom carpet.

Julian.

I almost didn’t open it. I sat with my thumb over the screen for a long moment, weighing exactly how much of myself I was willing to extend toward a man who’d spent five years taking without noticing, and now, apparently, intended to keep finding new and more public ways to notice all at once.

I opened it.

Julian: I meant what I said today. Every word. I know you have no reason to believe that, and I’m not asking you to. I just needed you to know it wasn’t strategy.

I read it twice. Then a third time.

I didn’t respond.

But I didn’t delete it either — and lying in bed an hour later, staring at the ceiling of an apartment that belonged entirely to me, I found myself thinking, for the first time since that humiliating dinner, not about revenge, or strategy, or even anger.

I was thinking about the exact, specific way his voice had cracked, just slightly, on the word thank you — and wondering, against every careful instinct I’d built over the past month, whether some part of him was finally, actually, becoming someone worth listening to again.

I fell asleep before I let myself answer that question.